Abstract

This essay considers the ways in which Highsmith and McCullers use theatricalisation of space to suspend the distinction between public and private as a defining trope in gender construction. Both texts, I argue, explore ‘transit’ as space/place that both resists and reinstates that public/private binary, through the use of what I term ‘spatial parody’. In The Price of Salt (1952) numerous cafes, restaurants and hotels provide a backdrop for the unfolding of a forbidden (lesbian) romance. In The Ballad of the Sad Café (1943) McCullers foregrounds the café itself and interrogates the relationship between ownership of space, gender performance and selfhood.